By-Right Zoning and Why the IVDC Was Never the City of Imperial’s Call to Make
The first and most fundamental fact about the City of Imperial’s lawsuit against the IVDC is geographic: the project site is in unincorporated Imperial County. Not within the City of Imperial’s boundaries. Not subject to the City of Imperial’s zoning code. Not in the City of Imperial’s jurisdiction for land use decisions.
The city filed suit anyway — to block a project that its own land use authority does not extend to, on the theory that Imperial County had approved it incorrectly. The Superior Court’s February 10, 2026 ruling that the complaint was “legally insufficient” is, in part, a court’s answer to a jurisdiction that overreached.
What I-2 Zoning Actually Means
The IVDC site is zoned I-2 Heavy Industrial by Imperial County. This designation has a specific legal meaning: the zoning code identifies the uses that are permitted on I-2 land, and industrial uses conforming to those designations are allowed by right. “By right” means exactly what it sounds like — the owner of I-2 zoned land has a legal right to develop it for permitted uses without seeking discretionary approval from a planning board, a city council, or any other body with the authority to approve or deny the project based on policy preferences.
The by-right system exists to create investment certainty. A developer who buys I-2 land knowing it is zoned for heavy industrial use is entitled to build a heavy industrial facility. If that entitlement can be defeated by a neighboring jurisdiction filing a lawsuit claiming the project should have required a CUP, the entire by-right framework is illusory.
The Permit Streamlining Act reinforces this. California law requires ministerial approval of projects that conform to applicable development standards within specified time limits. The IVDC’s site plan was submitted. The county reviewed it against I-2 standards. It conformed. Approval was ministerially required.
The CUP Theory and Why It Failed
The city’s legal theory was that a project of the IVDC’s scale — 950,000 square feet, 330 megawatts, 1,688 construction workers — was too large to be processed as a by-right ministerial approval, and that its impacts required the discretionary review that a Conditional Use Permit process provides.
The court rejected this theory as legally insufficient. The reason is fundamental to how zoning law works: the size and complexity of a project that conforms to applicable zoning standards does not transform a by-right approval into a discretionary one. If I-2 zoning allows heavy industrial uses, a large heavy industrial project is permitted. The code does not have a size exception that converts conforming uses into discretionary ones when opponents find them inconvenient.
If the county’s I-2 standards need to be revised to address impacts from very large industrial users, the appropriate mechanism is a legislative update to the zoning code — a transparent public process in which the community sets the rules prospectively. What is not appropriate is using litigation to retroactively impose discretionary review requirements on a project that was approved under the rules as they existed.
The Jurisdictional Question
Setting aside the legal merits, there is a governance question that the City of Imperial’s lawsuit raises: what gives a city the standing to challenge a county’s approval of a project in unincorporated county land?
California law provides avenues for challenging land use decisions, and neighboring jurisdictions can sometimes establish the standing necessary to pursue those challenges. But standing is not unlimited. A city that claims standing to block development on county land — based on claimed impacts that the court has found legally insufficient to support a CUP requirement — is asserting a very broad version of municipal authority over regional land use decisions.
The implications extend well beyond this project. If any city can block development on unincorporated county land by filing a facially insufficient lawsuit and running out the clock on the developer’s financing, no county approval is ever secure. The investment certainty that I-2 zoning is supposed to provide becomes conditional on whatever neighboring cities choose not to challenge.
The February 10 ruling said, clearly, that the city’s challenge was legally insufficient. The rule of law requires treating that finding as what it is: the end of a legal theory that shouldn’t have been pursued in the first place.
